Of all the intellectuals who
endorse gun prohibition, none is more eminent that Garry Wills. It is
therefore especially interesting to note what kinds of contortions Wills must perform in
order to support his wish that the federal government may confiscate
handguns from law-abiding citizens.

Wills made a big splash with a 1995 article in the New York Review
of Books, titled "Why We Have No Right to Bear Arms." (Sept. 21,
1995). Acknowledging that the "Standard Model" of contemporary legal
scholarship recognized the Second Amendment as guaranteeing an
individual right, Will countered that the Second Amendment "had no
real meaning." Thus, according to Wills, only "wacky scholars" and
their dupes believe that the Second Amendment affirms a right of
individuals to own firearms for protection against tyranny. The Wills
article has been cited by Federal District Judge Jack Weinstein, and
is perhaps the most-cited professorial article used in arguments
against the Second Amendment as protecting a meaningful right of the
people.

One of Wills's main points is that the language of the Second
Amendment itself is contrary to an individual right. This is a
particularly tough point for Wills to make, since — as the Supreme
Court has written — the phrase "right of the people" appears several
times in the Constitution, and appears to be a "term of art" having a
consistent meaning. [United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez,
494 U.S. 259, 265 (1990).]

Could it really be that Madison meant to guarantee a meaningful
individual right in the First Amendment (which protects "the right of
the people" peaceably to assemble), but in the very next Amendment,
Madison used "the right of the people" to create an Amendment that had
no real meaning? Then, in the Fourth Amendment, Madison reverted to
his former draftsmanship, and guaranteed "the right of the people" to
be free from unreasonable searches — and he meant this right to be a
meaningful right of individuals. Then, in the Ninth Amendment, rights
were reserved to "the People" — again referring to ordinary Americans.

Wills does not attempt to prove that Madison kept changing his mind
about whether "the people" mean "people" or "nobody at all." Nor does
Wills attempt to refute the Supreme Court's recognition of the common
meaning of "right of the people" throughout the Bill of Rights.

Nor does Wills carefully examine all of what Noah Webster — the
foremost authority on early American usage — has to teach about the
Second Amendment. If you look up every word from the Second Amendment
in Webster's American Dictionary of the English Language, then
you get a rather plain statement of the Standard Model of the Second
Amendment. Using Webster's definitions, the Second Amendment would
read: "The good order of able-bodied men required to attend military
exercises on certain days being indispensably requisite to the
protection of a not-enslaved body politic, the just claim of the body
of persons who compose the United States to retain and wear weapons
and armor shall not be violated."

While hardly as elegant as the Second Amendment, Webster's dictionary
does point us in the same direction as did the many 19-century legal
commentators who explained that the militia (an essential institution
of a free society) will only be effective as long as the people are
guaranteed the ownership of arms. In fact, Noah Webster himself,
during the ratification debates, provided a concise summary of why the
entire population should be armed:

"Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they
are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America
cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the
people are armed, and constitute a force superior to any band of
regular troops that can be, on any pretence, raised in the United
States." [Noah Webster, "An Examination into the leading principles of
the Federal Constitution."]

Since Garry Wills argues that resistance of a tyrannical government
would be treason, it is not surprising that Wills prefers not to
engage Noah Webster in much detail.

Wills takes a rather different approach to language. He translates
various terms from the Second Amendment into Latin, announces that all
the terms — in Latin — have a military connotation, and therefore the
Second Amendment is a meaningless platitude about the military and not
an affirmation of the people's legal right to have weapons. The most
obvious objection to this approach is that the Constitution was
written in English, and intended to be comprehensible to the entire
American population, much of which did not speak Latin. Nor is there
any historical evidence that Madison hinted about a secret non-meaning
of the Second Amendment which could be uncovered by translating the
Amendment into Latin.

Of
course many of the Founders, Madison included, were college-educated,
and could read Latin fluently. But many of them could also read Greek,
which was an essential part of the college curriculum of the time.
Madison also knew French, Spanish, and Hebrew, as did many other
educated men of the period. So why not translate the Constitution into
Greek, French, Spanish, or Hebrew, and find what meaning could thus be
invented against the plain meaning of the text in English?

Translating a document from its original language into a second
language inevitably creates distortions based on the cultural
differences between the two languages. There is no word for "privacy"
in Russian, so trying to understand the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark
privacy case Griswold v. Connecticut by first
translating the case into Russian is likely to impede, rather than
enhance, understanding. That is why scholars trying to analyze the
intended meaning of Bible passages read those passages in the language
in which they were written.

The Roman Empire where Latin existed as a living language was, for its
last five centuries, ruled by a standing army increasingly dominated
by conscripts and mercenaries; the Empire was a military dictatorship
which had fallen away from republican virtue. The Founders were
familiar with Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire, and thus with Gibbon's observation, early in the first
volume, that "A martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of
arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional
assemblies, form the only balance capable of preserving a free
constitution against the enterprises of an aspiring prince."

By
looking through the lens of a language from a society that embodied
what the Second Amendment was intended to prevent, Wills obscures his
vision.

Consider, for example, the totally different meanings of "liberty" and
"freeman" in Rome and in the United States, as explained by Francis
Lieber, one of the most important political scientists of early
America:

"The Roman lawyers say that liberty is the power (authority) of doing
that which is not forbidden by law...The same lawyers say: Whatever
may please the ruler has the force of law. They might say with equal
correctness: Freeman is he who is directly subject to the emperor;
slave, he who is subject to the emperor through an intermediate and
individual master. It settles nothing as to what we call liberty, as
little as the other dictum of the civil law, which divides all men
into freemen and slaves. The meaning of freeman, in this case, is
nothing more than non-slave; while our word freeman, when we use it in
connection with civil liberty, means not merely a negation of slavery,
but the enjoyment of positive and high civil privileges and rights."

Winston Churchill once suggested that the most significant fact of the
twentieth century was that Great Britain and the United States spoke
the same language. Churchill's point was that a common language
creates a host of common assumptions about society. If we want to
understand the Second Amendment and the rest of the Constitution, then
we must start by using the language in which those documents are
written: English.

One might ask why Wills bases his theory of the Second Amendment on a
methodology only slightly more useful than translating the
Constitution into computer programming languages like C++ or BASIC.
The answer may be that building a case for a meaningless Second
Amendment is impossible if one relies primarily on normal sources,
such as the text of the Constitution as written in English.

All of the legislative history of the Second Amendment indicates that
the Americans who put it into the Constitution thought that it meant
something. Congress debated the particular language of the
Amendment; several states which ratified the Constitution
simultaneously adopted resolutions demanding a Bill of Rights, and
containing language which was eventually incorporated in the Second
Amendment. Yet Wills would have us ignore the obvious intentions of
all the people from the Founding Era who thought that the Second
Amendment had meaning; instead, we are supposed to rely on the alleged
secret intentions of James Madison, having first discerned those
intentions by translating his words into Latin.

That someone as smart as Wills can make such preposterous arguments
shows how desperate are the emotional needs, in some quarters, to make
the Second Amendment disappear by sheer will-power. Garry Wills
despises "the sordid race of gunsels" and "gun fetishists" whose mere
ownership of defensive firearms makes them "traitors, enemies of their
own patriae." [Garry Wills, "Gun Rules...or Worldwide Gun
Control?" Phil. Inq., May 17, 1981, page 8E; Garry Wills, "John
Lennon's War," Chi. Sun-Times, Dec. 12, 1980.]

Wills' problem is he believes, as he wrote in 1981, "Every civilized
society must disarm its citizens against each other" Unfortunately for
Wills, he lives in a nation whose Supreme Court has declared that the
right to keep and bear arms "is found wherever civilization exists." [United
Cruikshank, 92 U.S. 542, 551 (1876).]

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